The incredible growth of social media sites has greatly impacted the way people live their lives. Almost everyone has a profile on Facebook and Twitter, two of the world’s top hubs where people converge, communicate, and socialize through online mediums.

In terms of commercial networking, a vast majority of business professionals and organizations are present on LinkedIn.

Beyond simply a networking platform, many businesses and professionals are discovering the potential of LinkedIn as means to direct quality traffic to a website (inbound marketing). This is most definitely true; however, the real question is, how does one fully maximize the potential of LinkedIn for inbound marketing?

So where does one begin with LinkedIn as an inbound marketing tool? Below we share some simple yet highly effective tips in optimizing your LinkedIn page to enhance your inbound marketing strategy.

Many underestimate the power of a complete and well-populated profile. Whether is an individual profile or a business profile, people (particularly professionals) will often thoroughly read throughout your profile to get a glimpse of your credibility.

Having accurate and detailed information in your profile enables LinkedIn users to get a clearer picture of you or your business, and thus help them decide whether or not you can provide them with the solutions they're seeking. Although this might seem like an obvious stem in the process, it's the foundation to establishing your roots on LinkedIn.

Like any social media platform, popularity helps immensely. Lilach Bullock, a social networking pioneer currently writing for the Social Media Traffic Generation, says that "first degree connections" can help you build a good reputation online.

These are the connections who help you get your name out there, primarily because they can read your profile and see your status. These first degree connects are often people you know or have worked with in the past. Many of these individuals can endorse your skills, which is a huge benefit for inbound marketing.

Having a presence on LinkedIn is one thing, but being active on LinkedIn is the game-changer. Whether you are having a sale, launching a new product, or just published an insightful blog post, make sure that you announce your goods on LinkedIn. This is perhaps the most effective way to levarage LinkedIn for inbound marketing.

All of your efforts compound - the more connections and popularity you can gain, the more potential exposure your updates will receive. In addition to sharing quality and relevant content, be sure to include a call to action as this can help motive users to click your into your goods.

Gather your peers (or even your competitors) and form a professional group on LinkedIn. Having your own community will allow you to interact with each other, learn business trends and trade secrets, and can ultimately inbound traffic to your site. Not only is this a great tactic for inbound marketing, but creating a professional group establishes yourself (or business) as a leader or online authority figure.

The trick here is maintaining the group and keeping it going despite competition. If creating a group is not in your best interests, join a group and be a social butterfly. People will acknowledge your presence, and if you're sharing good insights and content, you may be able to establish some great connections.

LinkedIn is a network created by and for professionals. Therefore, people will often look into your profile to see what you can provide. Having a sample of your expertise or a portfolio of your previous work can provide people a preview of what you can offer them. Like top #1, this effort is to estbalish your credibility so other individuals see value in what you have to offer. Without credibility, the inbound marketing potential of your efforts is diminished.

Stephanie Simmons, writer for Social Media Examiner, states that many online professionals neglect LinkedIn because it does not have the same features or capabilities for online socialization such as Facebook. However, Simmons urges digital-based experts should explore LinkedIn because it is the social hub for all types of professionals.

Remember that LinkedIn is filled with decision makers, managers, entrepreneurs, specialists, and consumers. Beyond just networking with these types of professionals, you can start leveraging your LinkedIn page for inbound marketing and driving potential business to your site.

Today's marketing strategies have shifted to online, even for law firms. When it comes to online marketing, SEO holds an integral segment in many different campaigns. Attaining top search exposure for relevant keyword targets can drive more clients and awareness to a law firm or a lawyer.

As people have become more dependent online, properly using SEO tactics and strategies can give lawyers and law firms the leverage they needed to bolster their reputation and drive new cases to their firm. If you are a lawyer or managing the marketing for a law firm, here are some effective SEO tips to boost your rankings and build a strong following of advocates.

1. Website Design and Optimization

Today, it is virtually impossible for lawyers to gain a competitive edge without a website. not to have their own websites. The idea is to design a website that is aligned to your mission, vision and target market. Professional looking websites require intensive research, something that website designers have mastered through time. It is important to create a website that has logical and intuitive navigation to put your online audience at ease in finding what they are looking for.

Although web design is outside the realm of SEO, offering a quality user experience helps to ensure your visitors stay on your site and turn into valuable leads. The right balance of white space and margins, custom CSS, graphics resolution, launching capability, and cross-browser compatibility - all of these elements must be top of mind when designing an SEO-friendly website.

In addition to a captivating website design, lawyer SEO must also focus on its on-page optimization. Search engines crawl, digest, and index the content of a website. When developing on-page content, it is important to place relevant keywords in the page title, meta description, headings, subheadings, and paragraph copy of a page.

For instance, if you are a divorce lawyer, try to ensure that the phrase "divorce lawyer" is strategically placed in these aspects of a page's content. It is also important to include your keywords in the URL when naming page. Lastly, when adding images, it is important to incorporate keywords as the images file name (before uploading) as well as in the image ALT tag, respectively.

2. Relevant and Valuable Content

When it comes to content, it is imperative to publish relevant pages that specific to your legal expertise. Important content to publish on your site are case studies, legal analysis, frequently asked questions about legal proceedings, white papers, and so on. Keep in mind though that good lawyer SEO strategies will sometimes include industry-specific information that can be easily digested by simple readers. Try to explain legal jargon in the simplest ways possible for your reader's easy understanding. Once content are developed accordingly, you can easily get into the top of the SEO ranking heap and promote excellent reputation for your practice.

3. Social Media Engagement

Social media has become a force to reckon with in today's search engine ranking algorithm. As important as having a website for lawyer SEO is your presence on social media. The more shares, re-tweets, and likes your SEO strategy have, the more it will boost your rankings and authority on your specific legal practice. Be visible in Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This is a great avenue for you to assert your expertise and knowledge, thereby, developing good reputation for your legal practice. Be professional when engaging in conversations on legal issues relevant to your legal expertise.

4. Create Back Links

If you are familiar about search engine algorithm, you may have an idea on why it is important to be consistent and reliable. Search engine algorithms do not just crawl and bank on keyword hits. Through time, it has been developed to evade Black Hat SEO tactics and rely more on "ethical" White Hat strategies when crawling for data to provide to end users. One important aspect that indicates relevance of your website and its content is the number of high quality links pointed back at you. With great content, you can easily create links from authority sites. This, in turn, will make search engines believe of your websites reliability and trustworthiness. Great content always build more links. The more links you acquire, the higher you go on the SERPs. The higher you go, the greater is the traffic coming in.

5. Earn Honest Reviews

Earning honest reviews, whether on your Google+ Local or Yelp page, is an important matter involves ethics (but can significantly improve your local SEO Peoria IL efforts.) Fake reviews are direct violations to review sites term of service and to state laws. Steer clear of services that offer fake reviews. When it comes to reviews, be truthful as much as possible. Today's SEO is more driven for quality and reputability. To boost your lawyer SEO results, it is better to get positive reviews from actual clients who are truly satisfied with your services.

So whether you're doing lawyer SEO in Atlanta, Peoria, or Traverse City, these same general strategies and tips will help your web presence thrive in the organic search results. To learn more, stay abreast the latest blog posts here at the Law Firm Web Marketing blog.

For over ten years, Google has been the king of search and has slowly claimed a large majority of searches being performed on the web. From starting a mid-scale search engine to a massive multi-billion dollar business offering email services, ads, apps, tools, and more, Google has been a powerhouse on the Internet in more ways then one.

In these ten years, a lot has changed in terms of SEO and how a website ranks on Google. From it only taking a few keywords on page to get ranked to now where you must take a whole list of things into consideration (i.e. optimized website content, high quality backlinks, social media presence, etc,) SEO companies are struggling to adapt to the evolving standards of Google search.

You see, Google is getting more intellegent and they are constantly updating their algorithms to try and make sure SEO companies aren't trying to exploit the system and get sites ranked highly through black-hat SEO company techniques and comment spamming.

This means that in this day and age you cannot get away with using black-hat techniques and quick methods to try and rank highly on Google's search engine. In fact Google have actually made the process of ranking a website highly on their search engine a whole lot harder for everyone in the hope that it means better search results, this means that your SEO company must make sure that you use only good sources for your SEO needs to ensure that your site ranks higher and doesn't get penalized later on.

Due to SEO becoming a lot harder and a whole dimension more complex a lot more people have been outsourcing their search markeitng needs SEO companies offering trusted services to get your site ranked highly on Google. Of course SEO companies have always been around ever since Google, But because bad SEO has a negative effect on your websites rankings nowadays it means that the companies offering the bad services have gone out of business.

This is because people won't pay for it anymore as it is much more worthwhile going with a SEO company offering SEO services that work with Google and not against it. In short, SEO companies and services providers, like Click Centric SEO, must use a very natural approach when offering SEO services.

Some of the larger SEO companies have stayed strong and have adapted to the changing times and Google algorithms and these are the companies that are now a lot more successful than the ones that chose to stick with low quality SEO.

I hope that this has opened your eyes to how SEO has changed over the recent years and how much more complex and difficult it has become, especially for people trying to get it done quickly or cheaply as they will face penalization once Google notices. If you do not do your SEO yourself then I strongly recommend that you search for a strong company offering high quality services with guarantee's of rankings to ensure the maximum results for your website and to make sure that you do not pay for something which negatively effects your website in Google's search results.

If created properly, backlinks are one of the most effective ways of increasing your keyword rankings in Google search. Link building is still incredibly important for SEO, however performing link building must be done in a very natural manner.

One of the most critical elements to take into account is the anchor text used when doing SEO link building. Anchor text is a set of clickable characters and words that are mostly used to hide the actual hyperlinks to any other page on the web.

To get you started on the right note, we have defined the primary forms of anchor text that you should keep top of mind. All of them have their advantages, so instead of using a single one, you should use a combination of these for effective SEO results.

In our mock example, we use www.TCTopofMind.com, a Traverse City SEO firm that's conducting an link building program.

Brand Name Links

One of the most preferred and natural ways of creating backlinks, these anchor texts use the brand or business name directly. For, instance, the anchor text "Top of Mind" is a brand name link for the URL "www.TCTopofMind.com". For effective results make sure that 30% of your backlinks are in this form.

Optimized Links

Optimized links are SEO-powered links that use exact keywords in the anchor text. Shoot for 25% of your link portfolio to include optimized anchor to best achieve sustainable search rankings. Using the anchor text "SEO services" is our example of optimized links for SEO.

Semi-Optimized Links

This is where you will have to use your SEO creativity. You have to combine your keyword with other useful text to create an effective anchor text. 25% of your anchor text should be in the form of semi-optimized links for effective results. And example of this form of anchor text could be "Traverse City SEO" (as a local modifier) or "organic SEO services" (as a long-tail variation.)

Generic Links

Anchor text that uses general words or phrases like "Click here". This one does not have any SEO advantage, but because they are very natural. Using them 10% of the times can result in a more natural appearing backlink portfolio

Naked Links

Naked links or direct links are links where you use the direct URL of the web page that you are referring to. Using the direct URL "www.TCTopofMind.com" is an example of a naked link. It is suggested that 10% of your anchor text or backlinks should be naked links to ensure your SEO link building efforts appear natural.

The above defined percentages are just a guideline based on the current search algorithm for Google. Since Google has this habit of continuously evolving its algorithms, you should also make it a habit of revisiting your SEO link building strategy (and new Google algorithm updates) regularly to take necessary actions, so that your SEO keyword rankings never degrade and stay fresh forever.

Website optimization is a key part of web development, SEO, and ongoing maintenance. However, website optimization is something that is often overlooked by webmasters. If you haven’t optimized your site or just intend to speed up the site, you should consider using these web optimization tips.

1. Choose a solid web host

Though the web hosting account doesn’t have a direct relationship with website optimization optimization, choosing the right web hosting account is essential. A solid web hosting account is the foundation of a site or blog. Its accessibility, security, server stability, customer supports and price all play a key role. It is for this reason that you must ensure that you are in good hands.

2. Host assets separately

Assets refer to web components such as static scripts and images that don’t need server-side processing. Some of these include images, web graphics, Cascading Style Sheets, javascripts and many others. Though it isn’t a must to host assets separately, there are tremendous results of doing so such as server stability and overall website optimization.

3. Minimize URL redirects

Webmasters tend to do URL redirects ( Meta redirects or Javascript) all the time. At times they intend to direct users from old pages to new ones or just guide users to the right page. Each redirect creates an additional round-trip-time (RTT) and HTTP request. When you have more redirections, users will take time to get to their destination time.

4. Customize header caching/expiry

When you use a customized expiry header, your web components such as static files, images, CSS and javascript will skip unnecessary HTTP request when a similar user reload a page for a second time. This will reduce the bandwidth required and thus help in a faster serving of the page.

5. Off-load assets

Off-loading refers to separating images, javascripts, static files and CSS from the main server to the place where the website is hosted and keeping them on another server or relying on other available web services. By this you will leave the server to the PHP processing. Some of the services to off load include images, web forms, javascripts, RSS, surveys and polls. If your blog is constantly requesting for assets, you should opt for paid hosting.

6. Handling web pages

Images play a key role in optimizing your company website. But if they aren’t properly optimized, they may end up being a burden and using unpredictably large bandwidth amounts. To optimize your image, avoid scaling them and instead practice inserting the right height and width. The good news is that you don’t have to be a SEO expert to optimize an image. There are various tools and web service that can help you do the job.

7. Handling CSS

Most modern websites have CSS as the foundation of their style, look and feel. CSS offers great flexibility to changes and is lesser in the number of codes required. But if badly coded, CSS could backfire. In order to optimize your CSS is properly, you should keep it short, use CSS Sprite and maintain your elements’ kids in line with the offspring. Every time a page is loaded, CSS sprite technique minimize HTTP request by combining several images in one image file and controlling its output with a CSS background-position attribute.

So whether you have an internal webmaster or have hired a web company to manage your site, consider these website optimization tips to better improve it's overall performance.

Local SEO involves making strides for a website (both onsite as well as offsite) to improve its position in Google local search. For most websites, search engines can be a major source of free visitors and these are quality visitors with high conversion rates.

Local SEO With Mutliple Geo-Targets

Local SEO often times involves planning the optimization strategy of a business with multiple branches or associates in different cities so that it ranks high in the search engines for local searches for that particular business.

There are two main approaches to geo-local SEO with multiple target - have separate websites for each city or town where the business is located or have a page for each city where the business has a branch or office.

Increasingly, it has become apparent that having a single website for a business with pages for each city or town is the more effective and economical option for local SEO. When there are multiple domains for the same business, it is likely that the customer will be confused regarding the authencity of the website. Have multiple domain names can be expensive due to the registration , renewal and maintenance expenses for domain names as well as web hosting.

By having a single website with separate pages for each location where the business has an office, branch or business associate can greatly reduce the time and effort spent for link building needed for local SEO. For the main product or service sold by the business, links can be built to the home page of the website, while for local directories, listings and yellow pages links should be provided to the relevant local page of the website. The city specific internal pages also benefit from the links that have been built to the home page of the website.

Making Strides with Geo-Local SEO

When undergoing geo-local SEO, the firm should decide whether they use to use single pages, directories or subdomains for each city or town based on their personal preferences.This boosts the local ranking of the website, and customer searching for a product or service provider in a particular city or town will be easily able to contact the seller.

A propperly run geo-local SEO strategy should also ensure that the content for each local page is completely unique to the city and not duplicated in any manner. They should avoid making minor changes in the content for each city,It is important have a real physical local address and unique contact number for each city, so that local customers can personally visit if required. This will also improve the conversion rate. A map should be included to give directions to potential visitors to the website.

Created local pages for the website in popular directory sites like Google Pages, Yelp. For a multi locational company, they should avoid including any location specific information on the home page to avoid confusing search engines. Additionally the name, address, phone number should be provided only on the city specific local page, and should not be combined with other locations, to avoid creating confusion. Following these guidelines can greatly improve results of a multi-city geo-local SEO strategy.

SEO is a very essential part of your law firm web marketing strategy. Improving your keyword rankings through SEO can stem from a well-integrated social media marketing strategy. However, let's think about your social media and networking in a different manner.

Off-line networking, an essential activity for lawyers, can be a great platform to make SEO-valued connections. Here are some of the steps to take during your networking visits to gather SEO ranking.

Invite Guest Bloggers with Specific Legal Expertise

Sometimes in your networks, there will be that one guys who seems to have a wide knowledge on various law topics. You can us such chances to invite them to write as 'guests' on your law firms' blog. Such advances will go a long way in ensuring that your site has quality content as well as quality shares and comments. Usually guest bloggers have their own following of regular readers and those readers will follow them even to their posts on your blog.

Write About Legal Conferences & Meetings

The best way to have your peers visit your site regularly is to ensure you write about the event. Post funny pictures and videos of the event to drive more traffic to your website. Most of your colleagues will be too busy with their daily jobs and will probably forget about events. Your site could be a good reference for you and your network of lawyers.

Gather Social Signals from Colleagues

Social signals are likes, comments, shares, tweets or anything related to appreciation of material on your webpage. Google has developed ways of using social signals to increase SEO ranking. Web pages with quality comments, likes, tweets and such are more likely to acquire a top Google ranking than those without. You should be able to convince as many of your colleagues to read your website (or blog) and leave comments or likes

Never Compromise on Content Quality

Once you gather traffic to your website ensure you never compromise on quality. No one wants to share poorly written content or even leave a comment. For you to get quality backlinks to your site (or blog) you have to give your audience quality content. Google ranks also have a way filtering poor content from the initial SERP.

When it comes to creating a cohesive SEO strategy, networking can be a fantastic way to leverage the aid of other proficient attorneys. In essence, why create enemies with your SEO efforts when you can build friends?

Social media is undoubtedly one of the most effective advertising platforms. With most people spending a better part of their day time in the social platform, many content marketers are taking advantage of this situation to share consistent and valuable information to potential customers.

This "advertising strategy" is not about selling alone, but establishing a rapport with prospects and other clients with an intention of motivating business and devotion from clients.

The truth need be told: the creativity and effort applied by content marketers is tremendous.

Coming up with various formats of presenting information like videos, whitepapers, e-books and info graphics is not a walk in the park. More to this are the essential steps to this marketing strategy, that is, writing, then designing and finally distribution. In addition, the stiff competition posed by other content sources such that each content source requires a great deal of effort to succeed.

What then are the strategies to an effective content source? One that is available to all potential customers and yields results? Bearing in mind that the content marketplace is very competitive therefore depending on platforms like search and social media is simply insufficient. A case study for instance showed that in 2012, tweets had on average a lifespan of 18 minutes, whereas a face book post will get half of its reach within 30 minutes of being published. Search engines also prove futile since they are complicated in terms of navigation and updating of algorithms.

Owing to such challenges, content marketers therefore need to embrace advertising as the ultimate technique.

How does one create a continuous stream of visibility?

The nature of content marketing is that it is gradual and it develops with time. One with a greater number of blog posts will have a greater chance of sharing these posts on social media, and in turn these posts can be shared by others as well (acting like a pyramid scheme). E-books and whitepapers that can be easily downloaded, can be advertised along with these posts thus allowing the marketers to acquire the prospect's email address and furtherance them. Good and high-quality content gets links to other web pages, increasing the number of people that view the content.

Advertising serves as a link, and can be used to join two unrelated ecosystems for a common motive. Prospects using these networks are guided towards satisfaction, through these advertising media. To achieve this flow of advertising and realize the benefits of content marketing:

Create useful and important content like eBooks, blog spots or guides.

Enable sharing of this content on social platforms like Facebook or twitter.

Ascertain which is most prevalent content by referring to network activities like 'shares' , 'likes' and 'retweets.'

The web makes it possible for any business to establish a strong web presence that has a potential of reaching a large group of audience. Your website, of course, is the most important element of your marketing plan. But creating and establishing a strong and consistent web presence requires a great deal of thought. For one, you need to plan what information you are going to put onto your site before going viral. You need to know how exactly you are going to connect each piece together, and that's where the challenge begins.

As long as you know what's important, you are good to go. Now, what's your starting point? Where do you set foot first? That's a question you may want to ask if you are planning to establish yourself on the web. Firstly, you need to define the goal of your website. Every business should have at least 3 goals. The most obvious one is to establish a web presence, the second and third is to differentiate your products and services and capture leads respectively.

You must fine-tune your site in such a way that it is search-engine friendly. That means if people search specific key words on major search engines like Google, you should be able to show up in the first pages. Studies show that 90% of individuals who search items online never go beyond the first two pages, and that means your site should be among those pages.

Creating a blog is another way to tell the world that you exist. It helps drive the badly needed traffic onto your website. It's a way of conveying your thoughts and insights to the world.

You are going to use social media as a channel that exposes you to the outside world as well.

The Big 3 for a Well-Optimized Web Presence

Search Marketing: SEO and PPC

Due to competition, you can't just create a website and put it there hoping that it will receive visitors, because it won't. There are a number of things you must do to it to make it visible. You must make the search engines play to the tune of your website. SEO or PPC programs is a great way of improving your website's visibility, but it must be done in the correct way. Your home page should include the relevant keywords that search engines must pick up when these keywords are searched.

You can use Google's suggestion to know which keywords are competitive and which one's aren't. There are also tools(some available for free) that can help you take your site's visibility to the next level. These tools track the keywords in which your website showed up for, and they also tell you which keywords are most popular. However, you must also be aware of Google's Penguin and Panda update, because these have also revolutionized the way SEO has been done for the last decade.

Some website optimization companies like the Web Presence Group offer search marketing services that stem from basic research evaluations to full-on website optimization programs. Depending on the nature of your website and business, such website optimization services are an invaluable investment.

Content marketing

Content marketing may involve the use of blogs to reach a wider audience. Just posting one blog won't take you anywhere. We are talking about consistent blogging with the right keywords incorporated into the content. Link building is the easiest way to get your website out there. You could also approach other popular blogs and write as a guest blogger in exchange for links. This is the most surest way to achieve results with content marketing.

Social media

All internet marketers swear by social media such as facebook, twitter and the rest. The more likes you have, the more credible your business appears to be. The more active you are on social media, the higher the chances of getting your business on the limelight. Think about posting your website link on one of the popular social media channels, and having users share it across a group of friends. Think about the massive exposure you'll get out of that simple act. But it takes patience to build a solid customer base through social media. So relax, and be consistent.

There is no better time than this for online business to capture leads and convert them into real clients. The best thing about it is that you don't have to struggle so much while the web is there to do it all for you. Don't downplay the power of content marketing, SEO or social media because they have proven to work effectively when applied the correct way.

According to Pricing Engine, advertising on Bing is "more efficient" compared to Google AdWords. This is big news for law firm search marketers, for this new data directly focuses on small to medium sized businesses (or SMBs).

It is a fact that Google has huge volume of searches, but when it comes to the overall average cost per click (CPC) Bing is much lower based on the analysis of Pricing Engine. Pricing Engine examined the data coming from several small business accounts. They discovered that although Google has slightly higher CTR (click through rate) average, the CPC's are much lower for Bing advertisers.

Bing "More Efficient" for SMBs?

Pricing Engine recognized that Bing is "more efficient" for SMBs. Although bigger companies may require the higher volume of searches on Google but SMBs does not need that kind of scale. Pricing Engine is helping small businesses in how they can effectively buy online ads. They compare data from their clients and present a report at the Street Fight Summit in New York. This data is very significant to their business since they will have the capacity to analyze the performance of PPC advertisers in relations to the companies. After examining this data they can provide some recommendations.

Jeremy Kagan, the CEO of Pricing Engine, revealed that this is the first time that they have shared the information regarding extensive trends. This data may not be statistically severe however his main objective it to start a discussion regarding the VSB or the very small businesses.

One of the major points of the report is that most small businesses put more focus on advertising on Google AdWords rather than using Bing. According to Pricing Engine, AdWords advertisers have an average rate of 2.4% on their clickthrough and 2.3% only for Bing. However, the cost of clicks on Bing is lower compared to Google AdWords. The cost per click of Bing is $1.10 compared to $2.40 for Google AdWords.

Pricing Engine also discovered the largest category based on the number of accounts is the stores. On the other hand, the greatest investors on Google AdWords are the digital services companies and ecommerce store PPC advertisers.

So, is your law firm doing any sort of PPC advertising on Bing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!